Slovenčina · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Slovak
Home row anchors
Settle both hands on the home row: A S D F for the left, J K L ; for the right.
These are the keys you press, and in Slovak they produce the letters printed on them. The 9 characters beyond a-z in the practice words here come from a modifier or a dead key rather than a key of their own, so they are not shown here.
Learning to type in Slovak
Slovak uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 9 characters beyond a-z — ý, á, ľ, ž, č and more.
Slovak (Slovenčina) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 51% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 9 characters outside a-z: ý, á, ľ, ž, č, ď, ň and š, among others. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
One number is worth carrying into the first session. About 66% of the letters in these Slovak words come from just ten characters. Get those ten genuinely automatic — not merely findable — and the rest of the layout stops being the thing standing between you and a readable sentence.
The course is deliberately narrow at the beginning: a handful of keys repeated until they are automatic, before anything is added. Nine stages later it has worked across the board, and 45 common Slovak words are waiting in the speed test for when the positions stop needing thought. Skipping ahead is possible and usually a mistake, because the later stages assume the earlier ones are already automatic.
The temptation in Slovak is to skip the accents while drilling and add them later. It does not work — the accent is part of the motion, and a hand that has practised the word without it has practised a different word. Drill them from the start, awkward as the first week is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 45
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 3.5 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Slovak practice words
- ý8
- á4
- ľ3
- ž3
- č2
- ď2
- ň1
- š1
- ť1
Counted across the 45 practice words. 51% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ý, á, ľ, ž and 5 more. The beginner course builds each drill by remapping the keys through a language’s layout, and there is no key map for Latin QWERTY family yet — so these stages work through the plain a-z letters. The 9 characters Slovak needs beyond them appear in the speed test and the games, which draw on the word bank, and the keyboard guide above shows where they sit on the layout you have selected. It is one of the two things most worth fixing here; the other is that 2 languages have no layout map at all.
pokojné ruky nájdu domáci rad bez pozeraniaThe letter with the longest name in the alphabet
Slovak uses a Czech-style QWERTZ layout with diacritics on the number row, and shares most of its letters with Czech. It adds several Czech does not have: ä, ô, ĺ, ŕ, and the digraph dz and dž.
The distinctive ones are ĺ and ŕ — syllabic consonants that carry a long mark, because in Slovak l and r can act as vowels and be long or short. Words can be built entirely without a conventional vowel, which produces the famous example strč prst skrz krk.
Slovak also uses the mäkčeň, the same háček mark Czech uses, which on tall letters is written as an apostrophe-like stroke rather than a v: ď, ľ, ť. It is the same mark, set differently for the letter's height.
Questions about typing in Slovak
Do I need a Slovak keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ý, á, ľ, ž, č and ď and others — are reachable on the keyboard you already own once the right layout is selected in your operating system's settings. Some layouts give them their own keys, others build them from a modifier; either way the hardware is unchanged.
Which Slovak keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 9 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 45 practice words between them use 30 of those 35, so 5 characters never come up in the practice text — these are the commonest words rather than an even sweep of the layout. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
How often should I practise Slovak?
Briefly and often. What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions, so ten minutes on most days will take you considerably further than an hour once a week. Stop while it is still going well — practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motion.
Where should I start with Slovak?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Slovak is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
How long does learning to touch type in Slovak take?
Longer than a week and shorter than you fear — and it depends far more on how often you practise than on how long each session runs. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones by a wide margin, because what you are building is recall and recall decays between sessions. The streak counter exists for that reason.
What will I actually be typing in Slovak?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — written in the Latin QWERTY family layout. The point of the course is the position of a key rather than the vocabulary. The 45 common Slovak words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Slovak hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 51% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 9 such characters appear in total, and the rest is a keyboard you already know. The difficulty is concentrated in a handful of positions rather than spread across the layout.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
No, and it is free either way. Every lesson, drill, test and game works signed out, with your progress kept in this browser. An account adds three things only: your progress and settings follow you to another device, your streak survives clearing your browser data, and you can appear on the leaderboards under a name you choose.
Also in Slovak: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
- Typing accented letters and symbolsDead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.